In the manufacturing, shipping, storing, handling and use of textiles and other fiber, strand, tape, strip, web or sheet materials, it is customary for such materials to be wound on cylindrical (or conical) cores and shipped as spools of material. A typical spool has a cylindrical configuration and may be sized up to twelve inches in diameter and between six and twelve inches in width.
For shipping and/or delivery of the material to an end-user thereof, a plurality of spools are arranged in side-by-side fashion on a tray or pallet constructed from corrugated material. Two or more trays are arranged in a stacked configuration and shrink-wrapped (or otherwise bundled), thereby defining a bundled package of a plurality of spools of material. It is desirable, therefore, to provide a packaging system for shipping and/or delivering a plurality of items arranged in a side-by-side and stacked configuration.
Conventional shipping packaging systems do not adequately prevent the spools from coming into contact with one another during shipping. Such contact may result in damage to the material, thereby rendering some or all of the material wound on the damaged spools as unusable. It is therefore desirable to provide a packaging system for shipping and/or delivering a plurality of items arranged in a side-by-side and stacked configuration such that the plurality of items are held securely in such configuration so as to minimize the likelihood that two or more of the items will come into contact with one another during shipping.
It is customary for the end-user of the material to store the spools of material in the packages used to deliver them and to remove the spools from their respective packages on an as-needed basis. It is desirable, therefore to provide a packaging system that is adapted to be used as storage for the spools of material until such time as the spools are needed. For example, it is desirable for the packages to themselves be stackable such that two or more of the packages may be placed in a stacked configuration for storage of a very large number of spools of material.